Surrealism Was a Mistake

Ninety years ago André Breton asked: “Can’t the dream be used in solving the fundamental problems of life?”

The answer, of course, is no. The unconscious does not offer some insight into the mystery of the human will, the relationship between subjective and objective reality, or the possibility of world peace.

But does it make for good art? On that score, the results are decidedly mixed.

Let me start by admitting that it is odd and usually unhelpful to think of artistic practices as either successes or mistakes. Practices are developed, rise or fall in popularity, are used to good effect by good artists and to poor effect by bad ones. But I would like to make the distinction here between the use of the fantastic in late 19th and early 20th century art and literature, which more or less developed organically, and Breton’s attempt to codify and regulate particular practices under the term surrealism.

The fantastic is not the same as surrealism. It is the use of images, often borrowed or indebted in some way to Greek and pagan mythology or Christianity, in the context of a larger work in such a way that surprises or that is particularly evocative. Examples include the work of François de Nomé, Gustave Doré, William Blake, and others. Breton’s surrealism, on the other hand, is both idealistic and ideological. It prescribes certain artistic practices—automatism—for certain aesthetic and social ends.

The word “surrealism” was first used in 1917 by Guillaume Apollinaire in reference to Cocteau’s Parade. Apollinaire was rather liberal in his use and definition of the term, as Ruth Brandon notes in Surreal Lives. (“When man wanted to imitate walking,” Apollinaire once wrote, “he invented the wheel, which does not look like a leg. Without knowing it, he was a Surrealist.”) Breton was not.

Breton argued that the use of automatism might provide a more all-encompassing, “synthetic” expression of the world—one in which all differences, including those between social classes, were obliterated. In his first Manifesto of Surrealism, Breton states that “I believe in the future resolution of these two states, dream and reality, which are seemingly so contradictory, into a kind of absolute reality, a surreality.” And in his Second Manifesto of Surrealism, he writes:

Everything tends to make us believe that there exists a certain point of the mind at which life and death, the real and the imagined, past and future, the communicable and the incommunicable, high and low, cease to be perceived as contradictions. Now, search as one may one will never find any other motivating force in the activities of the Surrealists than the hope of finding and fixing this point.

American attitudes and uses of surrealism have been more pragmatic. Painters such as Gerome Kamrowski and William Baziotes rejected surrealism’s radical politics but played with images associated with dreams in their work. And in a talk at “The First Papers in Surrealism” in 1942, Robert Motherwell argued that while automatism was, technically speaking, impossible, a version of it—what he called “plastic automatism”—could be a useful tool in picture-making.

In the end, though, plastic automatism has little in common with Breton’s surrealism. It is simply the painter’s free use of paint and other materials in a work as these items come to mind or to hand. Painting takes time to execute, and because of this, it is impossible to reduce the time between brush stroke and some thought supposedly at the edge of consciousness to maintain the fantasy that the unconscious is in any way being explored.

Poetry has not been so lucky. Paul Éluard, Blaise Cendrars, and others attempted to put Breton’s ideas (which were, after all, principally addressed to writers) into practice and the results were incredibly boring poems, even despite the occasional violent or sexual image. Benjamin Péret’s metaphors are striking enough (see “Hello”), but all in all, it’s been a miserable failure.

Despite this, soft surrealism—that is, a little incoherence there, an out of place violent or sexual image there (no one tries to actually use automatism)—is still relatively popular today. It makes a poem look edgy, in-the-know, and it has a nice leftist pedigree. The problem is that this soft surrealism can hide incompetence and often adds nothing to a poem, other than the above stylish marking. (Examples—almost all published this month—can be found here, here, here, here, and here.)

Stephen Burt has written against this soft surrealism, which he calls “elliptical poetry,” and has suggested that a renewed focus on objects in poetry—on “well-made, attentive, unornamented things”—might (and should) replace the “slippery, digressive, polyvocalic,…overlapping, colorful fragments” of a still fashionable soft surrealism.

I would propose a different route. Getting rid of incoherence, meaningless images, fragmented syntax, and so forth, could open a much needed opportunity for a fantastic in poetry that makes sense. Too long has the fantastic been wedded to Breton’s watered-down automatism, and breaking definitively free from it might open the field for more poems like Marly Youmans’s Thaliad or Joe Fletcher’s Sleigh Ride. And that would be a very good thing.

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14 Responses to Surrealism Was a Mistake

What about Bosch? Doesn’t seem to fit quite in your Doré/Blake category. Alot of surrealism draws what power it has, I think, from a subtle use of the disgusting. Lucifer in a lake of ice not surreal, but a fish with human feet and a broom up its rear is getting there. Is an impaled egg or a melting clock just more refined versions of Boschian bizarrities?

Surrealist film is certainly, to me at least, interesting and amusing.

But, leaving aside my personal preferences, How can a school of art be “a mistake?” You might not like it, you might even have cogent arguments to support that opinion, but the movement itself cannot be a mistake. I think that is called a category error. Two plus two equal five is “a mistake,” Buffalo is the capitol of New York State is “a mistake.” The Surrealism, is not and was not, “a mistake.”

I think you’re confusing Surrealism with its usurpation by bad artists to excuse their sloppiness and lack of ability. Don’t know the rules of grammar and wig out on punctuation? Never mind, I’ll call it “surrealistic” and cover all my errors.

Interesting article. If by making sense you mean telling a story. There was someone, I think Milan Kundera, who also thought artists and writers needed to view mass culture with suspicion because they would be mired in banality. There is more than a grain of truth to this. But now, to me, modernism seems banal if we define it as a willful disorientation of the senses. I reckon modernism nowadays is 75% Dada and 25% identity group agit-prop and has evolved into rancid oikophobia.

But I can understand why young artists were and still are attracted to modernism. Its sexy. Nihilism and faux cosmopolitanism can rile the squares. Also, modernism surfaced as a means to go beyond mere illustration. Modern artists would discover hidden truths and knowledge, or gnosis, denied to purveyors of traditional western forms. Or at least that was the plan.

Cendrars was not a Surrealist (though like Appollinaire he could be considered a precursor of the movement). As for Eluard, it was not his Surrealist poems that are boring (I certainly wouldn’t describe L’amoureuse as tedious) but his post-Surrealist ones dedicated to the PCF, the cause of Liberty, and Comrade Stalin (the same is true of Aragon, but Aragon’s political poems are at least less trite and technically more accomplished than Eluard’s).

By “Surrealism was a mistake” Mr. Mattix really means “I don’t like surrealism.” Well, I don’t either. It seems empty and pretentious.

On the other hand, the test of art is whether it moves people – emotionally, spiritually, intellectually – and whether it teaches something useful. Enough people seem to think surrealism does those things that it is arrogant and presumptuous to make a definitive statement otherwise.

As to whether the dream and other methods for direct experience of the unconscious, can be used in solving the fundamental problems of life, the answer, of course, is not no.

Cendrars wasn’t a surrealist. And “boring?” I wonder if Mattix has actually read “Prose of the Transsiberian.” It might not be your cup of tea, but it seems baffling to call it boring.

There are also assumptions galore here. People like Breton preached automatism…but how often did the best “surrealist” poets use it as a method and simply leave it at that? Certainly not Eluard or Aragon in their best poems. As others have pointed out, both of them did write some boring stuff, but lots of great stuff as well.

It might also be worth noting that many of the best postwar French poets—Rene Char, Francis Ponge, Yves Bonnefoy—began as surrealists and then migrated elsewhere to cultivate to their individual styles and visions.

And really: using weak surreal-ish poems from recent magazine issues as a cudgel to beat Eluard and Cendrars?

I don’t even know where to start with that article – I mean, yes, the poems he links to are really blah, but so is, I dunno, a ton of other stuff. And, yes, it may be time for some kind of reaction against bad surrealist-inspired verse, but good writing of any stripe might suffice. That, and he seems to be really hung up on the fact that Breton wanted to link poetic form with politics. I guess I’m just more forgiving there, because he (the article’s author) seems so utterly unreflective about questions of form. Seriously, I really thought he’d end by saying that poems should give us concrete advice, like how to grow beans or something (with allusions to “pagan mythology” on the side).

Surrealism has a slightly different meaning in story telling, but it’s still plenty valid.

A surreal story allows you to move from one reality to another in the same tale. It’s like the twilight zone. It’s a story about old people in an old folks home. They kick a magic can and suddenly, it’s a story about kids playing kick the can, or maybe a guy picks up a hitchhiker. They drive and get along. He says, “You wanna see something really scary?”, and suddenly were in a horror movie.

A Surreal story, in it’s essence, is that precise moment when you’re dreaming, and then suddenly, you wake up. It’s a sudden shift between two realities. While not part of the surrealist movement, I would point to Herman Melville’s short story, “Benito Cereno” as the first tale to demonstrate this concept. It’s a story about a captain who lost his crew, and now he finds himself adrift at sea on a ship full of african slaves.

As a wannabe, unproductive writer, I find surrealism more relevant now than ever because in the virtual, chemical world we live, multiple realities are possible, and they makes for interesting story telling.

Consider the film Inception (2010). This movie gave us not only a warped, dreamlike, reality. It was also the kind of story where you think you know whats happening, and then suddenly, it jumps to another reality, and you’re in a whole different story, and on top of this, much of the story itself unfolds from inside peoples dreams. It’s a surrealism triple play… surreal visual, surreal story, and it takes place in a dream.

It’s not the kind of movie I pop on and go to sleep to. It doesn’t have a high rewatchability, and it wasn’t a non-stop thrill ride, but it was incredibly original.